BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL
There’s something a bit sick about enjoying this kind of stuff so much. I’m sat uncomfortably on the floor with my hand going numb and enveloped in densely layered treated noise at ear damaging volumes. It’s clearly not sensible and yet I’m stupidly happy. Just one guy and a table full of electronic doohickeys to warp and subvert the distorted drones but he’s creating enough noise to fill The Arches and probably push out some of the oxygen as well. I came to from my reverie at one point to realise some awesome thudding drums had appeared which quickly brought everything together to a fevered climax. My favourite set so far and short enough to feel like there wasn’t a second wasted.

SUN CITY GIRLS
Arriving onstage disguised by masks and costume brandishing chairs Sun City Girls were somewhere between performance art and theatre. Spoken word pieces, odd percussion and general gibberish were slightly overshadowed by lion taming, book reading and a round of golf with ping pong balls. While generally entertaining it was often incomprehensible nonsense. As the crowd thinned later I discovered they had ditched their costumes and when they broke into some straight-up folk songs it was as if the first part of the set had been merely a figment of my deranged imagination.

HIJOKAIDAN
Think of the most intensely exciting, idiotically loud 30 second pinnacle of live music you’ve ever experienced. Hijokaidan just start at that point and continue it for 40 minutes. They just ignore all the build-up, the winning over the audience and just get straight in there like a kick in the face, throw themselves and their instruments about in euphoric abandon and demand your fervour like they’ve been thrilling you for an hour instead of 2 minutes. And, hell, did they get it. Half the audience were on their feet punching the air and going nuts. The other half were getting the hell out of there before they damaged their hearing permanently. This was squalling, screaming madness and I loved it.

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3

I’ve missed Instal. My first time back since 2002 and really nothing’s changed. More seats thankfully although it really doesn’t seem like Instal if I don’t spend half the day sitting on the concrete floor contemplating my shoes and gazing happily at the brickwork and metal while trains rumble overhead and noise rumbles through me. I don’t have the stamina to see or write about everything on this weekend but I will collect my thoughts as I go and post some of them here. (Also, massive thanks to Barry for getting me in).

JANDEK
I spent most of Jandek’s set hovering up and down the fun scale, unsure of whether I was enjoying this and, maybe less importantly, whether it was good. Though, whenever I decided it was tedious tosh (about 5 separate occasions in over an hour) he always managed to do something to bring it back and make me re-assess. I liked things in isolation – Jandek’s mournful lamenting, his intuitive guitar playing, the gorgeous echoing bass – but rarely thought they worked all together, wavering between unstructured and cluttered. I think I’d like it better stripped down to bass and vocals.

JOJO
Simply one guy and a guitar making a racket. At times fighting with his guitar, at other times cradling it, this ordinary looking guy whipped up some awesome sounds – waves of feedback punctuated by bursts of noise, whispers and screams. I’m looking forward to seeing him with Hijokaiden today.

BLACK BONED ANGEL
This was sheer spectacle, the stage beautifully lit with clear colours lighting up the fog of dry ice through which you could glimpse the silhouettes of 2 men with guitars. They built up their piece from quiet doom to full on apocalyptic terror and it was mesmerising. The guitar onslaught was interspersed by minimal, powerful percussion leading to me trying to make the case for them as the anti-Low. By the climax, god knows how many minutes or hours later, it was like sitting in a wind tunnel of noise with my clothes flapping and the slow creep of deafness threatening my ears. At the end they did devil horns to the crowd and then had a big hug. Aw.

Day 2
Day 3

Girl/boy duos, is there anything better? Especially when they both sing, the boy’s drumming and the girl’s playing guitar. And the boy’s our own Stevipus. This is one of Steve’s new projects now that Cat on Form are sadly no more and my lord are they great proving that, really, drumming is just all about hitting stuff with enthusiasm. Blood Red Shoes take the violence and playground poetry of Huggy Bear and team it up with the interlacing duelling vocals of Sleater-Kinney to create basic, thrilling songs. With repeated statements of intent over jagged guitar, there’s no mistaking their aim. The taunts of “I hate you” in Don’t Always Say Yes are delivered with matter of fact bluntness and a glint in their eyes. Stamp it into black and red swirled vinyl and package it in screenprinted cardboard and it’s like riot girl never ended. Which it didn’t, not in our hearts.

Blood Red Shoes
Jonson Family

1-2-3-4! I’m trying to remember the last time I bought a pop single. It’s probably not since they stopped releasing them on 7″ vinyl. CD singles have always seemed an enormous rip-off to me – horribly packaged and taking up way too much space in my collection for one song since the b-side is usually a dodgy remix or – woo – an instrumental version. However, the main reason for this purchase (well, apart from feelings of slsk guilt and some kind of wish to make Rachel Stevens not feel like a failure come Sunday evening) was the fact that the b-side is amazing and bizarrely has been left off the album. Waiting Game is co-written by Rachel Stevens herself and while it’s not the most innovative song ever recorded the “no, no, no-no-no-no” bit at least should win some kind of catchy pop award. With lyrics consisting of a stream of pop cliches and a bassline with the snap of elastic it harks back to those classic S/A/W album tracks, the ones maybe lacking that extra spark that makes a pop hit but still pressing all the right buttons. The a-side you must have heard, a drum-heavy Adam and the Ants style stomper glittered up and filled with enough gleeful energy, whoa-ohs and hey-eys to get anyone singing along. Just give in.

This is the sort of thing that sounds wrong whatever speed you play it at. And yet so, so right. These short songs delight me in their oddness and madness and cleverness. Holy Fire is my favourite, all sped-up banjo, tinny beats and droll vocals. At times Um is a Fisher Price Beck, Syd Barrett thrown blinking into the sunlight and Dawn of the Replicants trapped in their bedroom for a month with nothing but a box of toys and some sherbet. You can probably get a good enough idea of the brilliance herein from the list of lists on Um’s website which include ‘Things I’m A Bit Kinky About’ and ‘A List Of Businesses On Mill Road Who Wouldn’t Hide You From The Nazis’. On this evidence Um is almost a reason to visit Cambridge.

Um
Strange Lights

Blimey. Just spotted the announcement for two more All Tomorrow’s Parties weekends for next May curated by Mudhoney, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Special Guests one weekend and The Shins, Sleater Kinney and Ween the next. I’m still noticing a lack of electronic stuff here which disappoints me. I think I am officially bored of indie rock.

KICK-ASS:

Crazy Boys – The best song on the new Rachel Stevens album and that really is saying something. I have listened to this about 14 times today and have had to copy the album on to CD so my Last.fm stats don’t get completely ridiculous (and so I can listen to it even louder and run around the room).

Fighting Boys – I will kick your ass, and enjoy it too.

del.icio.us – Nothing (much) to do with boys but a super-helpful mishmash of bookmarks, RSS and blogging that is pretty much acting as my online memory and to-do list. I will make a diskant group collaboration one soon. It’s the future!

Howl’s Moving Castle anticipation – It’s been out a whole week but I’m finally going tomorrow and I’m so excited I can’t even eat my free cake.

LAME-ASS:

Rocktober – If it’s October it must be time for 700 bands you like to come and play in your town all in the same week. And charge you £9 a ticket. What’s so great about live music again?

My TV – Why why why do you have to hate Channel 4? Why not Channel 5 or ITV? WHY?

Telephone Spam – Every time I answer the phone it’s one of those recorded messages (about what I have yet to find out), some guy trying to sell me something or this woman who keeps calling and then saying she has the wrong number. And then my mother phones and she wonders why I sound so aggressive.

Over-ambitious zine making – see comments.

It’s been a while. If you remember the deep dark beginnings of diskant you’ll remember the diskant bands – The Oedipus, the Gringo lot and of course The Hypotheticals, the band of diskant stalwart Greg Kitten. Back in those days the Hypotheticals were a fun indiepunkpop band but now they’re back, they’ve ditched their The and they’re a bit angry. Opener Feel (Felt) has some duelling guitars, screamy vocals and a good dose of pissed off that lets you know things have changed round here and you best just get used to it. It’s always good when a band finds some attitude. These new songs have much more of a riffy, punky thing going on bringing Hirameka Hi-Fi to mind, mainly due to the sulky, shouty Essex vocals but also in the frantic drumming and sharp, sparky scrapey guitars. Klobber is the catchiest by far with a weebly twiddly bassline and a fantastic EEP guitar bit that you know they do synchronised moves to onstage. Let’s hope they can keep up this kick-ass attitude and get themselves a new record out.

more info: gregkitten at gmail dot com

A new series whereby we call out anomalies in the diskant group charts on Audioscrobbler/Last.fm and let you the reader guess the answer. The exciting part is that only the person who is the answer knows the answer (i.e. the asker doesn’t)

Today: Who else (other than me, obv) has been listening to Girls Aloud this week?

Also, as Simon P rightfully demanded the other week: who the hell’s been listening to Dire Straits??

Make your guesses in the comments. Hopefully the accused will come clean (otherwise this will die a quick death, I guess).

I am finding the whole Audioscrobbler thing fascinating. Do I really like Rachel Stevens more than Hood? Is it surprising that 7 out of my top 10 artists are female-led? Are the RIAA secretly monitoring the stats to see who’s listening to albums that haven’t been released yet, you dirty music stealing pirates? How relieved am I that I listen to my own band less than other people in the diskant group listen to theirs? And why do we willingly give so much information on our lives to the public?

Hurray, we finally got our group quota on Audioscrobbler a couple of weeks back so you can now view our weekly charts of top artists and tunes. I’m not entirely sure what kind of maths they use to calculate these charts (I assume how many of us are listening to the same stuff) but it’s as wilfully non-overlapping as usual. I’m sure this can only get more exciting as the weeks progress…